take it seriously. Şinasi altered the paradigm of writing within the Ottoman Empire by simplifying the language, intentionally engaging directly with an increasingly literate public, and introducing new, more European, genres to the masses. He attempted to forge a pure Turkish (öz Türkçe), through the elimination of words borrowed from other languages in order to make the content and style of his work more appealing and easier to comprehend. At the time of his death, Şinasi was working on a large-scale Turkish dictionary in order to help formalize the language. He also simplified the Arabic-based Ottoman Turkish script, combining the nashk and kufi calligraphy, but he "only succeeded in reducing the more than five hundred signs used since Muteferrika first cut his type to 112.". Journalism Şinasi's most notable enterprise in journalism was founding the publication , or "Interpreter of Ideas", in 1862. It was the first truly influential newspaper in the Ottoman Empire. This publication was the successor to another newspaper called that Şinasi had previously founded and edited with his associate Agah Efendi. In these newspapers, he employed a "journalistic Turkish" that was heavily influenced by the coarser language of average Ottoman Turks (kaba Türkçe). He advocated strongly for an increasing Westernization of the Ottoman Empire and also for "encyclopedism"; he believed that the public should be educated in a wide variety of subject areas, so his pieces frequently included references to figures, such as Plato or Newton, and elevated concepts such as natural law. After joining the reformist secret society Young Ottomans in 1865 and going into exile in Paris, Şinasi transferred the management of the Tasvir-i Efkâr to his employee and colleague Namık Kemal. He then returned to Istanbul and died soon thereafter. Şinasi, influenced by Enlightenment thought, saw freedom of expression as a fundamental right and used journalism in order to engage, communicate with, and educate the public. By speaking directly to the public about government affairs, Şinasi declared that state actions were not solely the interest of the government. In the first issue of his first newspaper, Şinasi wrote, "Since people who live in a society have a duty of loyalty to various official obligations, it necessarily follows that a part of their rights consists of the dissemination of verbal and written ideas to promote the interests of the motherland." Literature In addition to his work as a journalist, Şinasi was a poet, translator,